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.The Superman strut instantlymakes you feel taller, stronger, and more in control of your environment.Alwyn s New Rules workouts have plenty of exercises in which you ll be instructedto perform scapular retraction.But one exercise you won t see in his workouts is theone-arm dumbbell row.If you ve spent any time at all around dumbbells and Imean both kinds you ll have seen this exercise performed countless times.Typically, it looks like this: The exerciser rests his left knee and hand on a bench,and then rows a dumbbell with his right hand up to his right side.If it s an olderwoman doing the exercise, the dumbbell is usually the weight of a Kleenex box, butthe woman still does the row slowly and deliberately, as if one false move with thatpaperweight will cause her entire skeleton to crumble.If it s a bodybuilder doing it,the dumbbell weighs more than Catholic guilt, and he s using almost every muscle inhis body to move it six inches or so.What neither type of lifter, or anyone in between, is likely to do is perform ascapular retraction.The old, frail woman has almost no tension on her muscles; theweight is so light that she can perform a facsimile of the exercise using nothing buther arm and rear-shoulder muscles.The bodybuilder is using middle- and lower-body muscles to generate momentum to get all that iron moving.That involves a148 THE NEW RULES OF LI FTI NGtorso twist, which prevents his trapezius from getting involved.His shoulder bladesdon t need to get any closer to each other, since he s using his core and gluteal mus-cles to rotate his shoulders upward.Alwyn chose a cool variation on that exercise to get around the problem.In thetwo-point dumbbell row, you ll stand on both feet, bend over at the hips, hold adumbbell with one hand, and keep the other arm behind your back.From that posi-tion, you have to focus on stabilizing your torso, instead of feeling free to twist it.Youshould feel it in all your back muscles, from top to bottom.Get good at it along with the other rowing variations Alwyn includes in theNew Rules programs and you won t have any trouble feeling the flow from Super-man s cape.FUNCTIONAL IMPORTANCEAs I said at the start of this chapter, part of the problem with modern life is thatthere s very little pulling involved, unless you do a lot of physical labor in your freetime construction, yard work, recreational steer-roping (relaxes me!).In sports, climbing and rowing involve pulls, as does wrestling.Sailing involvesall sorts of pulls; nautically minded friends assure me that, on the most windy days,sports like windsurfing challenge your back and arm muscles about as much as theycan be challenged.Dragging a kayak or wind sail into shore is yet another pullingchallenge.Perhaps the biggest benefit of doing pulling exercises in the gym, aside from im-proved postural awareness, is that you teach your body how to do it without gettinghurt.A study by Stuart McGill, **, showed that veteran firefighters were able to pushand pull loads with hardly any stress on their lower backs.The other group used in the study college students with no particular experi-ence or training in the movements tested experienced all kinds of back strain.Butthe firemen knew how to use their entire bodies in movement sequences that kepttheir backs safe.And that s exactly what Alwyn and I hope you get out of the exercises in thisbook, and especially those in this chapter.PULL 149TECHNIQUEAlwyn s workouts feature two types of pulling exercises (well, three, actually, but thehigh pull takes a bit of explanation; you ll find it with the combo-movement exercisesin Chapter 14).For simplicity s sake, let s use Ian King s terminology and call them vertical and  horizontal pulling.Both types of pulls start with a scapular movement.The key to the vertical pull a category that includes lat pulldowns, chin-ups,and pull-ups is an initial downward movement of your scapulae.In English, thatmeans you start by pulling your shoulder blades down and together.Then you engage your lats and rear deltoids, which pull your upper arms downand back slightly.Your biceps and forearm muscles kick in last, bending your elbowsso you can get your chin over the bar, or the pulldown bar to your chest.You don thave to pay attention to the sequence, of course; it happens on its own.A similar sequence occurs with the horizontal pulls, which include bent-over andseated rows.This time, the first movement is scapular retraction, your shoulderblades coming together in the middle of your back.(You can always tell when some-one is nearing the end of a set of cable seated rows.His shoulders start to rise up, asign that his middle traps are officially fried.) Then the lats and rear delts engage topull your arms back, and then your arms kick in.On both types of pulls, you want to keep your hips and lower back tight and en-gaged but not put them in motion.Thus, no leaning back on the lat pulldown orcable seated row.A real danger with the seated rows comes when you allow your torso to lean for-ward and your lower back to slip out of its natural arch.You re begging for a spinal-disc injury when you do that.Pull-up or Pulldown?This rule is simple: If you can do pull-ups or chin-ups for the designated number of repeti-tions, choose them.If you can t (and few of us can, when the workout calls for more than tenreps), do a lat pulldown with a comparable grip underhand for chin-ups, overhand for pull-ups, mixed-grip when that s called for.Chin-ups and pull-ups are total-body exercises, sinceyou have to contract everything to keep your body balanced when you re hanging from thebar.Pulldowns work the upper body perfectly well but allow the lower body to take a break.150 THE NEW RULES OF LI FTI NGTHE EXERCISESLat pulldown6'USED IN: All programs (see  Pull-up or Pulldown? on page 149 for an expla-nation)SETUP: Attach the appropriate bar to the high pulley of the lat-pulldown station.Grab the bar with the designated grip (if the workout chart doesn t specify, use anoverhand grip that s just outside shoulder width).Position yourself with your kneesunder the pads, if the apparatus you re using has them.Start with your arms straight,PULL 151Win One for the GripperEvery well-equipped gym offers a variety of attachments for rows and lat pulldowns.Thesehandles allow every possible type of grip overhand, underhand, and whatever lies in be-tween.Let s look at how those various grips affect your muscles.Your forearm has two bones, the radius and the ulna.The two of them are parallel toeach other when you take a palms-up grip, with the ulna on the inside (above the pinkie) andthe radius on the thumb-side.That alignment puts your biceps in their strongest position.When you rotate your hands inward so your palms face each other, you have what scalled a  neutral or, if you want to get really geeky,  semi-supinated grip [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]